A world-class photographer explains why he still loves black-and-white

A black and white image
that I shot, that's far less interesting than Anuar Patjane
Floriuk's. Check out his work at the link at the bottom of this
article.Rafi Letzter/Tech
Insider

It's easy these days to think of black and white photography as
more of an Instagram filter than a real genre. All of our digital
cameras shoot in color. The world is in color. So why isn't black
and white solely the province of artsy teenagers and the past?

The brilliant photographer Anuar Patjane Floriuk
explained in an
interview with Tech Insider why he still loves black and
white shooting. "I think
it's a psychological thing," he said.

You are limited by black and white and you don't have to
think about color. You are free of color. Color is always a
problem. It distracts. Not only to the viewer. It distracts when
you are taking the photo. So the moment color's not in my mind
anymore, the whole way my mind works about the photographic
process changes totally. You're looking differently. By
discarding color, not having it in your hands, you totally start
to change the way you think about a photo.

In the history of photojournalism and art photography,
color shooting only became widespread fairly recently. And for
photographers who carefully consider every aspect of their
images, it's an extra layer to add on more than something to
artificially strip away. Some, like the brilliant
Kendrick Brinson and David Walter Banks, do it beautifully.
Others, like Floriuk, choose to ignore it.

For photographers like Floriuk, photography is about light,
shadow, and motion. Color is distracting. In fact he uses a
$7,400 Leica M Monochrome, a digital camera that doesn't see
color at all, in order to cut color out of his brain when
he's shooting.

You can check out his beautiful underwater photos and learn
more about how he shoots here.